The Dance of Numbers: A Comedy of the Last Men

Lo, behold the spectacle that unfolds before us - a grand theatre of mediocrity where accountants and politicians, those merchants of comfort, debate the destiny of a nation through the lens of ledgers and spreadsheets! Mark Carney and Pierre Poilievre, two shepherds of the somnolent masses, engage in what they deem a battle of fiscal virtue.

Observe how they dance their petit bourgeois waltz! One speaks of frameworks and separations, as if the arbitrary divisions of money could birth greatness. The other bellows about waste and deficit, while both cradle the sleeping masses in their arms of false security.

In this land of perpetual slumber, Carney emerges with his "revolutionary" notion of separating operating and capital budgets - a householder's wisdom elevated to statecraft! How the drowsy citizenry nods in appreciation at such comfortable analogies, comparing the might of a nation to the management of their modest dwellings.

See how they reduce the grand questions of existence to mere arithmetic! These are the signs of a people who have forgotten how to dream dangerously, who seek safety in the counting house rather than glory in the storm.

The spectacle grows more amusing as Poilievre, that self-proclaimed warrior against waste, brandishes his sword of austerity. Yet what is his crusade but another lullaby for the dozing multitudes? He speaks of cutting foreign aid and bureaucracy - the easiest targets, the lowest fruit, while the true rot of mediocrity remains untouched.

In this theatre of the absurd, both players promise to maintain the very mechanisms that keep the populace in their comfortable stupor - child care, dental care, pharmacare - the sweet honey that makes the medicine of existence palatable to the weak. They compete to prove who can better preserve the status quo, who can more skillfully maintain the great sleep of the nation.

These are your leaders, O Canada! One who would dress up debt in new clothes, another who would trim the fat while leaving the disease untouched. Both promise you comfort, security, and the continuation of your blessed sleep.

The true tragedy lies not in their accounting methods or their promises of fiscal prudence, but in the death of all higher aspirations. Where is the call for greatness? Where is the vision that would shake the nation from its slumber? Instead, we are treated to debates about "frameworks" and "waste," while the spirit of adventure and risk withers in the shadow of bureaucratic caution.

The masses, meanwhile, continue their contented grazing, occasionally lifting their heads to mumble about interest rates and inflation, before returning to their peaceful rumination. They seek not the mountain peaks of achievement but the valleys of comfort, not the dangers of creation but the security of preservation.

Look upon this spectacle and weep, ye who still dream! For this is what becomes of a nation when it chooses accountants for prophets and bureaucrats for visionaries. The ledger has replaced the sword, the calculator the scepter, and the balance sheet the holy book.

And so the great dance continues, with Carney and Poilievre leading their somnambulant followers in circles, each claiming to know the best path to maintain this great slumber. They speak of efficiency and prudence, those virtues of the merchant class, while the true virtues of courage, creativity, and noble ambition lie forgotten in the dust.

Let it be proclaimed from the mountaintops: A nation that debates accounting methods while the world burns is a nation that has lost its way. The true deficit is not in the books but in the spirit, not in the treasury but in the soul. Until this truth is recognized, all talk of frameworks and waste is but wind in the ears of sleepwalkers.